The Il(literacy) Impact on Language Change in Brazilian Portuguese (Prof. Silvina Montrul)

Event details Date: Tuesday, September 8, 2026 Time: 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM Location: Coble Hall, 801 South Wright Street Champaign, Room 306 Type: Lecture About this event General Events Calendar home Calendar search Share on Facebook Tweet Email add to calendar contact add an event Event subscriptions General Events The Il(literacy) Impact on Language Change in Brazilian Portuguese (Prof. Silvina Montrul) The Il(literacy) Impact on Language Change in Brazilian Portuguese (Prof. Silvina Montrul) Sep 8, 2026 12:00 - 1:00 pm Coble Hall, 801 South Wright Street Champaign, Room 306 Lecture Sponsor Lemann Center for Brazilian Studies Speaker Silvina Montrul Views 9 Originating Calendar Spanish and Portuguese Calendar Brazilian Portuguese has been undergoing language change and exhibits variation in the morphosyntax of the spoken and written registers. O ur research team ( Montrul , S., Ionin , T., Grolla, E. et al.) has been examin ing the linguistic knowledge of adult Brazilian native speakers and the impact of schooling on their linguistic knowledge and use . I present results of a study of intra-speaker variability in language comprehension and production of morphosyntactic aspects of BP that differ in spoken and written language (inflected infinitives, clitic pronouns) and complex sentences (passive and active relative clauses). Monolingual native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese (N = 72) of different levels of education completed a battery of cognitive tests and a sentence repetition task testing morphosyntactic and complex syntax properties of Brazilian Portuguese. Both complex sentence comprehension and r epetition accuracy w ere related to level of education . I n the production task, participants with lower levels of education produced more repetition errors in morphosyntax. However, 3rd-person clitics , which are undergoing diachronic extinction, were the most variable category of the morphosyntactic structures tested in all groups. Other repetition errors reflected native speaker knowledge of spoken-only or spoken and written registers. S ome of the patterns of language production were found to reflect the ongoing diachronic changes present in the Brazilian Portuguese language. So far, o ur study suggests that level of education might drive diachronic change in monolingual contexts. Official event details: https://calendars.illinois.edu/detail/7/33561173